Law Commons^™

Does The Federal Government Own The Pore Space Under Private Lands In The West? Implications Of The Stock-Raising Homestead Act Of 1916 For Geologic Storage Of Carbon Dioxide, Kevin L. Doran, Angela Cifor

Kevin L Doran

This paper establishes that pursuant to the mineral reservation contained in the Stock-Raising Homestead Act of 1916 (SRHA), as well as U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence that has further defined the scope of that reservation, the federal government likely holds title to some 70 million acres of subsurface pore space located under private land in the West. In addressing the issue of pore space ownership, scholars and regulators have focused on the question of who owns the pore space when the mineral estate has been severed from the surface estate. This approach, however, overlooks the critical fact that for the approximately …